They Shoot Cartoonists, Don’t They?

On the morning of January 7, following the terrorist attack on the Paris office of the satirical journal Charlie Hebdo, CNN was continuously occupied with discussions of the event by various purported experts. On the screen below the talking heads appeared these words: “Is Paris shooting an attack on free speech?”

I believe the answer to that question may just possibly be Yes.

Invading a newspaper office and slaughtering the people who work there, in response to its satires of your religious heroes, does appear, at least on the surface, to be an attack on free speech. Even President Obama, who has been reluctant to say anything that could possibly be considered critical of Islamists, and whose administration tried mightily to blame the Benghazi disaster on an idiot whose so-called movie had supposedly hurt Islamic feelings, immediately stood up and said that what happened in Paris was “an attack on free speech.”

Now, what are the greatest dangers to free speech in the world today?

One is political Islam, in most of its forms. A prominent CNN commentator, a twit named Bobby Ghosh, took care to emphasize the idea that “everyone across the Muslim world agrees that this [the terrorist attack] is not an appropriate response” to critiques of Muhammed and his faith. This idiotic remark went unchallenged by the network’s other twits. But while some Muslim governments have criticized the Paris terrorists, their objection boils down to an attempt to exclude interlopers from their own campaign against freedom. What would have happened to the staff of Charlie Hebdo if they had performed even one satire of Islam within the territory of an Islamic state? They would have been lucky, very lucky, to escape with their lives. There is one successful secular state in the Islamic world, and that is Turkey; and the Turkish government just granted its first permission since 1923 for a Christian church to be built in its domain.

But don’t just blame the Muslims. Western European cultures have never quite gotten the point about the right to free speech. For centuries England has been noted for government pre-censorship of the press and for weird libel laws that allow anyone with hurt feelings to take the nearest free speaker to court. England is the place where the star of an American TV crime show (Telly Savalas) successfully sued a paper for saying that his singing was no good. The other Western European countries have a panoply of hate-speech laws that allow people to be sent to jail simply for what they say or write.

And don’t just blame the Europeans. How long, O Lord, has political correctness been surging in America? It probably started in the 1960s, when leftists sold the idea that it was vicious persecution to call someone a Communist simply because he was a Communist. Senator McCarthy is dead, but anti-McCarthyism still has long teeth. Then came the idea that no one’s feelings should be hurt, and that anyone represented by a pressure group got to decide what is meant by “hurt.” Almost everyone knows, regrets, and laughs at political correctness — but it grows upon us daily. Even the New York cops, a tough bunch if ever there was one, now complain that Mayor De Blasio (admittedly a complete jackass) didn’t simply endanger their lives but went so far as to hurt their feelings.

Don’t just blame the Muslims. Western European cultures have never quite gotten the point about the right to free speech.

We can’t do much about religious fanatics in other lands, but we can do something to clarify our own attitudes. The next time somebody talks about how he’s in favor of “responsible free speech” or “protected free speech” or “speech that is free in the political arena” — all of which means that free speech is not a right but just something you may be allowed if you have a good purpose and don’t “hurt” other people — repeat what Isabel Paterson said: “When we say free speech, we mean free speech, even if you don't know what we mean.”

About this Author

Stephen Cox is editor of Liberty, and a professor of literature at the University of California San Diego. His recent books include The Big House: Image and Reality of the American Prison and American Christianity: The Continuing Revolution.

Atlas on Woodward Avenue

The great power outage that struck Detroit on Dec. 2 reminded me — did it remind you also? — of the way in which Ayn Rand and some of her disciples used to look for signs that “Atlas is shrugging.” They closely inspected every sign that scientists and engineers were withdrawing from the industrial grid and that the grid itself was collapsing.

The apocalypse never came. Jimmy Carter was kicked out of the White House. Stagflation went away. Capitalism kept producing wealth even faster than the government could devour it. Even in this Age of Entropy, Atlas is not so much shrugging as working harder than ever to pay his medical bills. He’s depressed; he’s ailing; but he’s still showing up at work.

Nevertheless, there is something emblematic, something that provides a startling reminder of the End envisioned in Atlas Shrugged, in the horrible fate of the former industrial capital of America. Detroit is bankrupt. It has lost almost two-thirds of its population. Large segments of the city have returned to wilderness. Along Woodward Avenue, once the Champs Elysées of the Midwest, every large business has disappeared. The avenue’s distinguished churches, each an architectural masterpiece, still raise their towers, but several have been abandoned, and all are struggling. A classic theater, a classic movie palace, a classic this and that have been heroically preserved, but the monumental beaux-arts building that used to be GM world headquarters is a nearly empty hulk in a crime-ridden neighborhood, a square mile in which only 3,000 people dare to live. A magnificent art deco skyscraper now houses the countless bureaucrats of the failed public school system. The Institute of Arts, one of the world’s most important museums, the gift of fortunes created by the automobile, has been supported by the state for many years. Its hours are limited; its parking structure has been closed because of structural decay.

A picture tells part of the story. It shows visitors standing in the museum’s central court during the outage. The court, which is lit by windows in the ceiling and is therefore not dependent on electricity, is decorated by murals made by Diego Rivera, a communist, and financed by Edsel Ford, an industrialist. The murals show the progress of industry and suggest that it can be used either to create or to destroy. Beneath the murals, people mill about, apparently oblivious to the art. Perhaps a few of them are reflecting on the process of cultural disintegration. Perhaps one of them is asking himself, Did Atlas shrug — or did he merely lose what made him Atlas?

About this Author

Stephen Cox is editor of Liberty, and a professor of literature at the University of California San Diego. His recent books include The Big House: Image and Reality of the American Prison and American Christianity: The Continuing Revolution.

There Is No Such Thing as an Innocuous Tax

On July 17, Eric Garner was accosted by police on the streets of Staten Island, suspected of selling cigarettes on which no tax had been paid. Garner complained, the police tried to arrest him, they got him in a chokehold, and he died as a result. His death has become an issue because he was black.

Do people really need charges of racism before they see how vicious the state can be — how vicious it routinely is — when it enforces its laws?

About this Author

Stephen Cox is editor of Liberty, and a professor of literature at the University of California San Diego. His recent books include The Big House: Image and Reality of the American Prison and American Christianity: The Continuing Revolution.

Missouri, Compromised

American political rhetoric is often like American politicians themselves: bland, oblivious, tone-deaf, and inimical to the cause of liberty. Whenever they say stupid things, we mock them for it, and justly so. But there’s another type of political rhetoric less entertaining but often far more harmful: the plain speech of the authority figure refusing to do anything which might in any way challenge the structure of which he is part. This is what we saw last night (Nov. 24) when St. Louis County prosecutor Robert McCulloch announced to the press that the grand jury convened by his office had decided there was no probable cause to pursue charges against police officer Darren Wilson for the fatal shooting of teenager Michael Brown.

Anyone tuning in could be forgiven for thinking that McCulloch was actually speaking for the defense. For more than 20 minutes, he laid out what he saw as the facts of the case, careful to promote the account he found believable—Wilson’s, of course—and to dismiss any others that conflicted with it, all prefaced by an attack on the “24-hour news cycle” that inconveniently demanded facts about a case where very few were made available to anyone outside the secret grand jury proceedings.

In theory, it’s the prosecutor’s job to convene such grand juries so that probable cause might be found, and the case proceed to trial. As Ben Casselman notes, the grand jury is a slam dunk for prosecutors — it is extremely rare for grand juries to refuse to find any reason not to go to trial, except in cases involving police shootings. So how then, in more than 20 years as prosecutor, has McCulloch never managed to successfully recommend charges against a single police officer? It’s not for lack of opportunity.

Anyone tuning in could be forgiven for thinking that McCulloch was actually speaking for the defense.

Potentially, it could have something to do with McCulloch’s father, mother, brother, uncle, and cousin all working for the St. Louis Police Department. Imagine if a case involving a company came before a judge whose entire family worked for that company: if the judge did not recuse himself, it would be grounds for his removal from the bench. Consider also that McCulloch is the present president of The BackStoppers, an organization that funds families of police officers killed or wounded in the line of duty. Of itself, this could be noble work—but McCulloch has been charged by the voters of St. Louis County with pursuing justice, and that means avoiding conflicts of interest or the appearance of partiality. Given his family history, his record of performance on the job, his daily work alongside officers, even his statement that he became a prosecutor because, having lost a leg to cancer as a child, he couldn’t become a cop—one can understand why there were questions raised about his sincerity in presenting this case to the grand jury. And it can definitely help explain why to many, including at least one former prosecutor, it looked like McCulloch had no interest in bringing a case at all.

But instead of recusing himself, McCulloch stayed on, up to the point of calling an inexplicably late press conference to mug for the cameras and urge for “calm” while the Ferguson PD rolled out all the military surplus gear they’ve acquired over the past decade: a troop carrier, sound cannons, riot armor, automatic rifles, and a seemingly endless supply of flashbang grenades and tear gas. (In more typically vapid rhetorical territory, President Obama took center stage soon after to say absolutely nothing whatsoever of substance, while scenes of gassed protestors played alongside him.)

One can entertain reasonable doubts about what happened in the meeting between Wilson and Brown. One could even believe, after considering the evidence as the grand jury supposedly did (in proceedings that cannot be disclosed, by a vote that they are legally obligated to conceal), that Officer Wilson was justified in shooting Michael Brown at least six times. But I struggle to imagine any circumstance under which one could find it appropriate that Robert McCulloch was wielding that authority and giving that speech last night. Because he was, we got the rare spectacle of an American public figure neither leaning on clichés nor bumbling his lines. No: he communicated, at length, exactly what he meant to say.

Hong Kong in Context

Taking a casual survey of American political rhetoric, one would suspect that we were at the dawn of a new age — or at least that this nation had a poor memory. Somehow everything has become unprecedented. Unprecedented healthcare reform; unprecedented opposition to healthcare reform; unprecedented Republican victories in the midterm elections; unprecedented demonstrations in Hong Kong. But China has a long memory.

The recent protests in Hong Kong have adhered to the choreography of Chinese politics in at least one important respect: the Communist regime has accused its political opponents of being unpatriotic. Xinhua, the state news agency, recently published a commentary denouncing celebrities who supported the protests for the putative crime of challenging the authority of the Party, and — by a heroic leap of logic — of betraying a lack of love for the motherland. CY Leung, the Chief Executive, has accused foreign actors of orchestrating the demonstrations. He did not specify who these foreign actors were, but we all know that he means the United States, as if we weren’t content with the existing friction in bilateral relations and decided on a whim to make life more difficult for the Chinese government.

The democratic aspirations of the people of Hong Kong should be framed, by them and by their friends abroad, not in terms of their unique identity, but in terms of universal values that all Chinese can share.

Such hamfisted tactics could be dismissed, were it not for the real danger that the accusations might actually be taken seriously. There is an ugly history of antagonism between the people of Hong Kong and their estranged brethren on mainland China, inspired by subjects ranging from the status of the Cantonese dialect to patriotic education to reports of tourists doing unseemly things in unseemly places in Hong Kong. To people from mainland China, the aloofness of people from Hong Kong often smacks of arrogance and snobbery. But the Chinese can put up with snobbery. It plagues Beijing and Shanghai, and nobody seems to mind. In the case of Hong Kong, the danger is that the protests may be viewed in light of this antagonism and interpreted as a posture of “more-democratic-than-thou.”

Hong Kong has always been viewed as an enclave of wealthy, westernized Chinese, enjoying a wide measure of civil liberties that have been resolutely denied to people from the mainland. There is a significant possibility that they will be regarded as spoiled children, not content with their privileges and clamoring for more. The Communist regime will avail itself of every opportunity to cast aspersions on the pro-democracy demonstrators, and any indication that this is a struggle for Hong Kong’s exclusive rights will only serve to alienate it from the rest of China.

The democratic aspirations of the people of Hong Kong should be framed, by them and by their friends abroad, not in terms of their unique identity — for that would invite references to their former status as a colony of the West — but in terms of universal values that all Chinese can share. To Americans nurtured on the idea of universal values, this should not seem unprecedented.

About this AuthorLin Lifu is a researcher of US-China relations based in New Jersey.

The Berlin Wall

I often travel between Canada and the United States. Typically, I am asked to line up involuntarily at the immigration counter to be interrogated by the officers. The Canadians and the Americans ask exactly the same questions. Where am I coming from? Am I married (for I have brown skin)? What do I do? Where do I live? What is my name? Where will I be staying? How long will I be there for?

The extremely clever minds of the officers process my tone and responses to decide whether I am a terrorist or not.

In Canada, I am often greeted as “Sir.” And when I am tired — after a 20-hour flight — they show some understanding. I expect none of this in the US. In the US, the herd is constantly shouted at to keep them well-behaved.

It is hard to think that these are actually our (public) servants. But given that an individual cannot really change much, one’s knee-jerk reaction might be a preference for the Canadian way.

I prefer the American way.

A long time back I was mugged when crossing a park in Manchester (UK). They addressed me as “Sir” and were extremely polite. When they found fifty pence in my pocket, for I was broke and hungry those days, they returned it and promised me that they would never stop me again. Then they let me go. Lacking perspective, I was lost and confused. I never reported this event. Were they not nice guys? They could have beaten me if they wanted to. At the same time, I was overwhelmed by an unknown, cloudy anger. How could someone who calls me “Sir” have the right to detain me? How could they touch me, physically molest me while showing respect toward me?

Twenty-five years after the destruction of the Berlin Wall, we are proud of the world without it, but now there are many more such walls all around us.

Had they not been nice, at least I would have left sane, with my mind clear, unclouded by conflicting emotions. I would have seen them clearly as robbers.

Do you remember the Internal Revenue Service? Would you not feel clearer about what they did if they did not call themselves a service? No one in his right mind considers it a service department and mostly it incites anxiety, even among the most “law” abiding people.

How many people experience any interaction with “peace officers” without fear?

When I get told what to eat, and what I can do or what I cannot do, should I feel warm about the caring nannies or should I worry about how, through a nice facade, they take over my liberties? Moreover, they attempt to confuse me through Orwellian language and the application of laws that claim to do good to me exactly when harming me.

I prefer the mental clarity and reduced frustration that come from a robber being clear that he is a robber.

Since the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Western world has become increasingly less free. All our lives are now fully documented and filed in obscure databases. In Canada, if you have a certain savings account (called a tax-free savings account), you don’t even have to file any tax documents. The revenue agency gets all the relevant information directly from the bank. If they don’t like how you run that account, they issue an assessment based on what the bank tells them.

We are repeatedly told that this is all for our own good.

Twenty-five years after the destruction of the Berlin Wall, we are proud of the world without it, but now there are many more such walls all around us. It is merely that we don’t see the walls as clearly and find ourselves confused even if we can see them, for they don’t have the rough facade that the actual wall had. We are presented instead with cuddly, warm, fuzzy facades.

I prefer the American immigration and the real walls. At least I see them for what they are. At least they don’t assault my sanity and confuse my understanding of morality.

I prefer that when I am raped, it is done in a way that I don’t enjoy.

About this AuthorJayant Bhandari is constantly traveling the world to understand it and to look for investment opportunities, particularly in the natural resource sector. He advises institutional investors about his finds. He also runs a yearly seminar in Vancouver entitled "Capitalism & Morality."

Canada’s 10/14

Two recent events in Canada have taken over the emotions both of Canadians and of people far and wide. In a more rational world these might not even have been news, but in our world they have become very big news, largely for the wrong reasons: the victims were in uniform and there is an association with Islam.

Americans and Canadians have been so conditioned to fear Islamic influence that even minor events related to Islam suddenly appear to be all that matters. They also forget that those in uniform take up jobs in which their lives may actually be at stake. Ironically, deification of the uniformed means that any death among them becomes the cause of hysteria.

The state never loses an opportunity for self-aggrandizement. The indoctrinated, infantile population, deep in their being expecting a utopia where no one ever dies or even gets hurt, must beg and plead for a bigger state, more reductions in privacy, and a ramp up of war.

Ironically, deification of the uniformed means that any death among them becomes the cause of hysteria.

In league with the United States, Canada has unilaterally declared war on several states or state-like entities in the Middle East, most recently on ISIS, an organization that no one, not even the “all-knowing” US spy agencies, had a clue about a few months back but that, ironically, for the convenience of the English speaking populace, has given itself an English name rather than scarier ones such as Abu Sayyaf, Jaish-e-Mohammed, Al-Shabaab, etc. The Taliban and al Qaeda are now old-fashioned. If what we have been told about ISIS is to be believed, it is trying to take over a region where what is supposed to work politically in the United States has not worked. Having removed Saddam Hussein, who kept stability and sectarian violence at bay, the US created massive chaos in the region.

The whole iteration of implanting democracies, removing democratically elected Islamists, funding and arming rebels who then become inconvenient, then going back through the sequence again and again, forever churning out more insecure sociopaths, hasn’t convinced the US that it should leave Iraq and Syria alone to deal with their own problems, organically evolving their own institutions, as Hayek would have suggested. The US and its groupies, Canada and the UK, must decide how others should live.

To say that there has been a lack of perspective concerning subsequent events would be putting it mildly. In Canada, the two murderers had opportunities to kill a few civilians on the way; they didn’t. Moreover, the fact that there was only one crazy who was involved in entering the Canadian parliament shows that he was unable to find more to join him in his “jihad.” Making the next step a rational response is too much to expect from indoctrinated Canadians. They will do exactly the opposite. They will work to increase the size of the state and its military effort. The guy working at Starbucks worries about the lack of driving rights among women in Saudi Arabia, not knowing that it is a US protectorate. In a generalized fear of all the strange things he hears, he sees massive civilian deaths by US drones as mere collateral damage; he acquiesces in the idea of killing women and kids to bring more freedom to women and better education to kids. People who are indoctrinated emotionally lose their bearings and their foothold on reality — and when it comes to the crunch, Canadians, the more indoctrinated and socialistic people, will exhibit a worse side than Americans.

We are constantly profiled, fingerprinted, photographed, and traced by our governments. Can writings like this be forbidden?

Stephen Harper will not let this overblown crisis go to waste. If sanity prevailed, Canadians would be protesting their entanglements in Iraq, Syria, etc., which have had horrible unintended consequences. But expecting rational actions would be asking for the impossible.

Post script: We must all watch what we say these days. What one says or writes ends up in the NSA or similar meta-databases. We are constantly profiled, fingerprinted, photographed, and traced by our governments. Can writings like this be forbidden? The Canadian government is contemplating a law to make it illegal for anyone to sympathize with terrorists. What “sympathy” means will of course be left to the judgment of the bureaucrat. My guess is that Canadians will take the pill of increased slavery without a murmur.

We often forget that governments can actually get away with a lot more than they do. The reason they do not increase regulatory control is not so much a fear of resistance from the citizens as a fear of hurting the economy, and hence their tax collections, as well as a realization that heavy-handed laws may increase corruption and the fragmentation of their control mechanisms, defeating the whole purpose. They always tread the thin line that helps them maximize control, tyranny, and privilege.

About this AuthorJayant Bhandari is constantly traveling the world to understand it and to look for investment opportunities, particularly in the natural resource sector. He advises institutional investors about his finds. He also runs a yearly seminar in Vancouver entitled "Capitalism & Morality."

Six Reflections in Search of an Election

1. So many wonderful entertainers perished on the stage this Tuesday! And I will miss them all. Mark Udall, who pushed women’s issues so hard in his campaign for senator from Colorado that respectable people called him Mark Uterus. Martha Coakley, who ran for governor of Massachusetts with but one purpose — to make everybody laugh — and fulfilled it brilliantly. The two successive Democratic candidates for Senate from the state of Montana — a retired Army officer whose response to his allegedly traumatic service in Iraq was a mad career as plagiarist, and a math teacher who doubled as a far-left video blogger, specializing in inane satires of people she disliked. And is Alison Lundergan Grimes, former Democratic candidate for US Senate from the Commonwealth of Kentucky, still bound by professional ethics not to reveal how she voted? Will we be forced to guess whether she voted for herself on Tuesday, or bolted to Mitch McConnell?

2. The Clintons lost 31 of the 48 races they campaigned in.

3. When Carl DeMaio, an openly gay candidate, campaigned for Congress in a notably non-gay district, the 52nd in California, he received no national attention — because he’s a Republican. The votes are still being counted, but he will probably win. As I write, the results of this election are still in doubt, the 52% of votes that were cast with absentee ballots not having been counted. You know how efficient the government is.

What kind of role would Barack Obama play in a political system that had no effective checks and balances? What internal checks would keep him from becoming a dictator?

4. All the political commentary preceding this election emphasized the extraordinarily large number of extremely close major races. Yet in most instances, Republicans won by margins ranging from the substantial to the stupefying. Are people lying to pollsters? If so, why? Are the polls weighted against the Republicans? Or is polling (perish the thought) not yet fully predictive, or even snapshot accurate?

5. Ask yourself what kind of role Barack Obama would play in a political system that had no effective checks and balances. What internal checks would keep him from becoming a dictator? None; none at all. We know that whenever he has been able to wield dictatorial power, he has wielded it; and he has proudly promised to do even more of that after the election. You can ask yourself the same thing about many of the people who have surrounded him as advisors, and about such elected leaders as Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid.

If nothing else, this election served the fundamental purpose of denying absolute power and apparent legitimacy to such people as that. You may feel intellectual contempt for Mitch McConnell and John Boehner — everybody does! But they notably lack the dictatorial temperament. And even if they didn’t, the victory of their party at both state and national levels means that dictatorial power has received a mighty check.

6. Albert Jay Nock, who is commonly regarded as a founder of libertarianism, wrote an autobiography entitled Memoirs of a Superfluous Man. Could today’s libertarians write similar accounts of our own lives?Certainly not. Libertarian ideas are everywhere in American society. They set much of the agenda of the two major parties, from legalization of drugs to reduction of taxes. The problem, of course, is that the ideas are inadequately distributed, that each of the parties has only half the libertarian agenda — Democrats, generally, the civil libertarian side, and Republicans, generally, the financial libertarian side — and that each of them fills the missing, nonlibertarian side with ideas so bizarre that one can only greet them with laughter (on one’s way to jail, perhaps).

Libertarians who throw elections to the more aggressively statist of the two major parties, which at the moment is the Democratic Party, are voting for that aggressive statism.

So we libertarians are no superfluous people. But if the Libertarian Party were to write its autobiography, Memoirs of a Superfluous Org might now be an appropriate title.

In this election, most LP candidates drew, as usual, very small numbers of votes. In a handful of states, however, their performance was notable. As I write, Robert Sarvis, LP candidate for Senate in Virginia, holds (with 2.5% of the counted votes) the balance between the Republican and the Democratic candidates, who are separated by 0.5%. If you believe survey results (see above), Sarvis drew more from the Republican than from the Democratic side, and may, when all votes are counted, have cost the Republicans the election. Certainly this was what the Democrats in Alaska thought, when they helped out the LP candidate in an attempt to deflect Republican voters. Yet the polling about Sarvis and about Sean Haugh, LP Senate candidate in North Carolina, indicates a grab-bag of voters, holding views on virtually every side of every issue.

As readers of these pages know, I am a dedicated proponent of voting for the lesser of the two evils. If you don’t vote for the lesser evil, you increase the chances of the greater evil. So Libertarians who throw elections to the more aggressively statist of the two major parties, which at the moment is the Democratic Party, are voting for that aggressive statism. According to me. But everyone can see the fallacy of the idea, constantly urged, that the Libertarian Party wages “educational” campaigns. Throwing an election to a party you loath is not educational, and if you don’t even get enough votes to throw an election, how educational have you been?

By the way, I am a registered Libertarian.

About this Author

Stephen Cox is editor of Liberty, and a professor of literature at the University of California San Diego. His recent books include The Big House: Image and Reality of the American Prison and American Christianity: The Continuing Revolution.

Public Servants

I’ve always liked the comedian Paul Mecurio. He’s a smart, funny, attractive guy. The other day, when I was surfing around and landed on Fox’s softnews program “Outnumbered,” I found that he was the guest, so I decided to watch.

Someone on the show said that President Obama behaves as he does because he “doesn’t like America,” and Paul got upset and said that he often doesn’t agree with Obama himself, but he didn’t like that kind of thing to be said about a man who has devoted his life to “public service.”

His statement came as a shock — not to the people of Fox, but to me. I’ve been listening to talk about “public service” all my life, but hearing Obama called a public servant made the concept seem even stranger than it had before.

Who, besides government employees, especially politicians, is associated with “service”? Who “serves” other people? Well, for instance, people in restaurants; they serve the public. They’re even called “servers.” So what, if anything, do a politician and a waiter or a waitress — a public servant and a servant of the public — have in common? That’s the question I asked myself, and one question led to others.

The last time you went to a restaurant, did you see your server punching, kicking, and biting the other servers, for the privilege of waiting on your table? Did your server claim to be the only person qualified to do so? Did you see him passing out money to the other diners, so they would choose him to wait on them? Or did he just promise them good jobs, cheap but perfect healthcare, and lavish retirement benefits? When you sat down, did he deliver an hour-long speech, saying how glad he was to see you and how much he had already done for you?

When you objected, did your server call the police and have you arrested for “hate speech”?

If you came with your children, were they ushered into a back room to be educated about how great the servers were? If you objected, were you sharply reminded that “this is the law”? After you’d been there a while, did you notice that many of the tables were filled with people who were eating and drinking but never appeared to receive a check? Did you notice that when they were rowdy and disruptive, the servers went to them and apologized for the disapproving looks that other diners cast in their direction? Did you notice that when the server brought your food, he first gave half of it to the people at neighboring tables?

When you read the menu, did you notice that many of the advertised dishes had been labeled “Unconstitutional,” and dishes with new and unfamiliar names had been penciled in? If you ordered filet mignon with the chef’s special sauce, did your server return with a cold turkey burger and an empty ketchup bottle? If you ordered a good cabernet, were you told that anything but grape juice was available only by prescription? If you complained about the food, did your server refuse to comment, because the matter was under investigation?

In the middle of your meal, did the servers suddenly head for the windows and start shooting at the restaurant next door? Did they grab all the young males in the place and use them as human shields? When the firing mysteriously ceased, did they demand a loan to cover the unexpected cost of ammunition?

When you studied the bill, did you notice that after your waiter added up the surcharges, special surcharges, seat rental fees, menu licensing fees, and other sources of revenue not previously mentioned, you were paying 15 times more than the amount listed next to the items you ordered — which, again, your server never brought you? When you objected, did your server call the police and have you arrested for “hate speech”?

Did those things happen to you? No? They didn’t? The people serving you never did any of those things? Then perhaps there is a difference between public servants and people who actually perform aservice to the public. And perhaps it’s time we clarified our vocabulary.

About this Author

Stephen Cox is editor of Liberty, and a professor of literature at the University of California San Diego. His recent books include The Big House: Image and Reality of the American Prison and American Christianity: The Continuing Revolution.

Yum

This election year has been full of odd little funny things. It’s like a buffet loaded with wilted salads and overcooked chicken — but down near the end of the table they’ve laid out some tiny, tasty desserts.

One of these delicious offerings was the response of someone named Alison Lundergan Grimes, the Democratic nominee for Senate from Kentucky, when she was asked, in an editorial conference at the Louisville Courier-Journal, whether she had voted for the much-detested-in-Kentucky Barack Obama. Over and over, she refused to provide an answer, blathering instead about what the election is really about, slamming her opponent, and saying that she “respect[s] the sanctity of the ballot box” (an odd way of indicating that although you want to go to the Senate and vote all the time, you won’t say how you voted for president). In this case, the hardcore partisan decided (and it was a decision, because her response was immediate and well-rehearsed) that hiding from her own party allegiance was worth the price of looking like a clown. Either that, or she’s so stupid she didn’t realize that she’d look like a clown. Anyway, it was a hilarious performance.

A few days before, Republican activists had secretly recorded conversations with activists in the Grimes campaign, including a major donor. They then shared these conversations with the national audience — chiefly comments about how Grimes was lying all the time about her support for the state’s leading industry, coal. Her reason? Otherwise, you dope, she would never get elected!

Who can withstand the force of arguments like that? Who can resist the comedy of people working in a moralistic cause while espousing a philosophy of amoralism?

Even funnier was an editorial statement that appeared in the Louisville Courier-Journal, in which the paper’s politics writer explains why it wouldn’t publish anything about the Republicans’ conversational adventures. You can read the statement for yourself and assess the reasons. But the first thing you’ll notice is that in explaining why the paper won’t run the story, the writer goes ahead and recites the whole thing!

As the waiters say: here’s your dessert — enjoy!

About this Author

Stephen Cox is editor of Liberty, and a professor of literature at the University of California San Diego. His recent books include The Big House: Image and Reality of the American Prison and American Christianity: The Continuing Revolution.